'Everybody wants to be a fascist' - Felix Guattari (Discussion)

Felix Guattari: I think that it was Bassi who proposed-if I have understood it correctly-a program inspired by David Cooper which consists of making love everywhere, as an alternative to getting mired in discourse. Of course, I'm in agreement with this! But perhaps it is necessary to clarify that "making love" is not restricted to interpersonal relations. There are all kinds of ways to make love: one can make it with flowers, with science, with art, with machines, with social groups ... Once the personological framework of Oedipal sexuality is shattered, a nonhuman transsexuality is established in the social realm, that is to say, through a multiplicity of material and semiotic fluxes. It's the entire individual libidinal economy closed back onto itself that is put into question. From this point of view, I am not at all certain that Laing and Cooper have made a very significant breakthrough. It seems to me that they very quickly lock the libido back up into a system of intrafamilial communications. I think that they are overly influenced by American communications theorists. Let us say, to proceed quickly, that it is not information but transformation that is at stake here.

​I would like to say to Emmanuele Amadio that there are all sorts of equivalents of psychoanalysis that are used to arrive at the same result: the neutralization of desire. One proceeds by reterritorializing it on familialism, on a technique of the body, on group therapy, on mystical practices, etc. Until a new order is achieved, psychoanalysis will remain the mastermind, the implicit frame of reference for these efforts. And this is happening even in the United States, where psychoanalysis has not gone off on a structuralist tangent, and where it tends to pale in significance next to body techniques and mysticism. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries there is a budding interest in psychoanalysis, but they are trying to adapt it to local conditions. In all likelihood, the goal will be to ​promote a normalization, an adaptation of individuals to the bureaucratic system. Thus, the technique of Oedipalization, the chasing of desire back into familialism, is not an activity which is confined to the analyst's consulting room. It is of increasing interest to pedagogues, priests, and political commissioners of all stripes. In the end, wasn't the preparation of the Moscow trials already a kind of psychoanalysis? Perhaps physical torture didn't play the most important role. It was in the name of the party, thought of as one large family, that the absolute submission of the accused was obtained.

​I am quite in agreement with Ricci and Bonetti: it's true that there is something absolutely artificial in speaking within the framework of a meeting such as this and above all in speaking about collective organizations of enunciation. 

I would like to respond to my translator, and to Pietrantonio. It is not a question of conjuring away the relationship of the subject to language, but, on the contrary, of clearing the field of a host of illusions concerning the structures of enunciation. The irreducible opacity of the relation of desire to language is not miraculously revealed by the silent listening of the psychoanalyst. On the contrary, I think that it is by breaking off, one way or another, with the techniques of semiotic interpretation that one can pave the way for a political analysis, eliminating the primacy psychoanalysis has granted to the significations that rule over desire. A micro politics of desire would refute the imperialism of signifying semiologies that cut desire off from the real. In refusing to consider the principles of signification and interpretation as immanent, this micro politics would refuse to accept the organization of dominant realities as an act of fate. It is not a question, for example, of magically denying signification by rendering language absurd and falling back into the techniques of word play, which psychoanalysts baptized "signifying interpretations," but of placing different semiotic systems in conjunction with each other, beginning with asignifying semiotics, that ​is to say those semiotic practices which use signs in order to transform the real and which constitute, precisely, the privileged site for the investment of desire in the social arena. One has to search for the semiotic opacity of desire on the side of asignifying fluxes, for example in the fluxual economy of economic signs, in music, in art and in "incomprehensible" revolutionary transformations. From that point onward, it is no longer surprising to discover the irreducible character of desire in language: desire is inseparable from the existence of semiotic chains of all kinds, and at the same time, it has nothing to do with the redundancies of significant semiologies, with dominant mental representations and repressive interpretations-except when it invests them as such in a fascist-Oedipal micropolitics.

​I think that I have already begun to respond to Calligaris, who, it seems to me, was also speaking in the name of Finzi. I repeat here that Deleuze and I do not intend to elaborate a scientific theory which would guarantee the existence of different social praxes. To advance theory, it is certainly desirable to reread Marx, but also to reread Hitler, and above all" to follow everything that emerges concerning struggles and current conflicts; indeed, one should not lose sight of the fact that this is the terrain above all where the major theoretical ruptures have occurred, as in May '68 in France, or today in Chile and in the Middle East. Collective organizations of enunciation, such as those mentioned here, depart less from coherent theoretical constructions than from provisional semiotic scaffolds, elaborated on the basis of contingent situations. Whenever they are cut off from practice, these scaffolds are always at risk of being recuperated by the machines of power. Actually, in science, theory doesn't work in any other way. 

I would like to conclude by commenting on an aspect of my translator's question which I did not answer: the risk of returning to an evolutionist way of thinking. Indeed, there is a point there which I haven't really been able to address in my exposition, even though ​it nevertheless was the essence of what I wanted to say. What insures the transition of the great classical fascist entities to the molecularization of fascism we are witnessing today? What drives the deterritorialization of human relations, what makes them lose their foundation in territorial and familial groupings, the body, age classifications, etc? What is this deterritorialization which engenders, in turn, the mounting of microfascism? This involves not only a simple question of ideological orientation or of strategy on the part of capitalism, but a fundamental material process: it's because industrial societies function on the basis of semiotic machines which increasingly decode all realities, all of the former territorialities; and it's because technical machines and economic systems are increasingly deterritorialized that they are capable of liberating increasingly greater fluxes of desire; or, more exactly, it's because their mode of production is forced to carry out this liberation, that the forms of repression are equally incited to become molecularized. A simple massive repression is no longer enough. Capitalism is obliged to construct and impose models of desire; and its survival depends on its success in bringing about the internalization of these models by the masses it exploits. It is preferable that everyone be attributed with: a childhood, a sexual positioning, a relationship to knowledge, a representation of love, of honesty, of death, etc. Capitalist relations of production are not simply established on the scale of great social groupings; from the cradle onward, they shape a certain type of producer-consumer individual. The molecularization of the processes of repression, and by extension, this prospect of a micro politics of desire, are not therefore linked to an ideal evolution of history or to ideological mystifications, but to a transformation of material processes, to a deterritorialization of all forms of production, whether it involves social production or a desiring-production. 

Félix Guattari - Chaosophy, Everybody wants to be a fascist, p.169-173/ Published by Semiotext(e)
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